Greek Tenses in John's Apocalypse

CHAPTER 13 Greek Tenses in John’s Apocalypse: Issues in Verbal Aspect, Discourse Analysis, and Diachronic Change

Buist M. Fanning

This essay will concentrate on discourse functions for the Greek tenses in the Apocalypse of John. I will pursue this through a dialogue with and critique of David Mathewson’s views as presented in his 2010 monograph published by Brill and an earlier article in Novum Testamentum (2008) on this topic.1 Mathewson’s work is a reflection of a larger school of thought on nt Greek verbal usage that has been influenced greatly by Stanley Porter, and so this gives me an opportunity to interact with the views of a larger group of recent writers based on work that I have done on verbal aspect in nt Greek.2 The issue that triggers this discussion is what some have called the confusion of tenses or erratic shifting of tenses in John’s Apocalypse, just one area of the larger topic of John’s solecisms or unusual Greek grammatical expressions.3 What Mathewson argues for (following Porter) and what I will dispute in this paper is twofold: (1) that aspect alone is the focus of the ancient Greek tense forms; they do not in themselves express any temporal meaning; in regard to the Apocalypse if we take time out of the equation, we eliminate all of the supposed problems with shifting tense forms; (2) the main secondary effect of aspect is a certain function to reflect discourse prominence, that is, background, foreground, and frontground events or features in a text. According to

1 Mathewson, Verbal Aspect in the Book of Revelation; Mathewson, “Verbal Aspect in the Apocalypse.” 2 I have great admiration for Stan Porter’s widely influential contributions to nt studies, espe- cially in Greek grammar and linguistics. I am grateful that our interaction with each other has always been cordial and, I hope, productive. This essay is intended to explore the fundamen- tal ways in which we agree about the Greek verb as well as points on which we still disagree. 3 An example of such tense shifting is Rev 7:9–14a, where the indicative verbs recounting the vision itself (not dialogue within the vision) are in sequence: aorist, imperfect, present, plu- perfect, aorist, aorist, aorist, perfect, aorist. This is followed in 7:14b–17 by a declaration by one of the elders in which the indicative verbs are: present, aorist, aorist, aorist, present, present, and then six futures.

Mathewson this discourse function for Greek verbal aspect appears frequently and consistently in the Apocalypse. On the first point, Mathewson’s argument is that the frequent occurrence of tense switching in the Apocalypse, often in the same passage, makes a temporal sense untenable. He writes:

One of the conspicuous features of John’s use of Greek tenses is their appearance in contexts that seem to violate their assumed (temporal) values. Specifically, Revelation’s visionary material commonly exempli- fies a shifting between all the major Greek tenses (present, aorist, imperfect, future, perfect) while often apparently maintaining the same temporal sphere of reference (the narration of what John saw εἶδον).4

On the second point, discourse prominence, he writes: “Verbal aspect, by indicting the author’s particular perspective on a process, can at times also function pragmatically in narrative to structure the discourse and indicate levels of prominence (background, foreground, frontground).”5 He argues that aorists are associated with background, presents and imperfects with foreground, and perfects with what he and Porter call frontground.6 In responding to Mathewson’s approach, I will first survey some broader principles about what the Greek tense forms mean in general and how they work in discourse structure, and then examine representative texts in the Apocalypse to illustrate how these principles show up in the book. A related question that arises along the way is the issue of diachronic change that appears in John’s use of the Greek perfect tense. One final introductory caveat: Semitic influence on Greek tenses in the Apocalypse will be mentioned here and there, but will not be a primary focus of this essay. This is not a primary part of Mathewson’s argument or of Porter’s before him. In their view as well as mine there is clearly Semitic influence but it does not help in solving the issue of “tense confusion” in the Apocalypse.7

4 Mathewson, Verbal Aspect in the Book of Revelation, 3. 5 Ibid., 47. 6 Porter, Verbal Aspect, 92–93. 7 See a similar conclusion in the recent monograph by Mot, Morphological and Syntactical Irregularities, 191–94.